The CloudHarmony Study

The study includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors who provide services like cloud servers, cloud storage and CDNs as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors as well. For their study, they used Panopta (a monitoring, outage confirmation and availability service) as well as a manual process to confirm and document any outages that were greater than 5 minutes. The full result of CloudHarmony’s comprehensive documentation and audit of SLAs is included in their post.

From the survey, CloudHarmony writes:

“GoGrid: provides a 100x credit policy combined with 100% SLA for any hardware and network outages and no minimum thresholds (e.g. 1 hour outage = 100 hour credit). This is by far the most generous of the 38 IaaS vendors we evaluated. GoGrid’s service is also one of the most reliable IaaS services we currently monitor (100% US West and 99.999% US East)”

CloudHarmony discovered three general themes as a result of their study, specifically (from their site):

Pro-rated Credit (Pro-rated): Credit is based on a simple pro-ration on the amount of downtime that exceeded the SLA guarantee. Credit is issued based on that calculated exceedance and a credit multiple ranging from 1X (Linode) to 100X (GoGrid) (e.g. with GoGrid a 1 hour outage gets a 100 hour service credit). Credit is capped at 100% of service fees (i.e. you can’t get more in credit than you paid for the service). Generally SLA credits are just that, service credit and not redeemable for a refund

Threshold Credit (Threshold): Threshold-based SLAs may provide a high guaranteed availability, but credits are not valid until the outage exceeds a given threshold time (i.e. the vendor has a certain amount of time to fix the problem before you are entitled to a service credit). For example, SoftLayer provides a network 100% SLA, but only issues SLA credit for continuous network outages exceeding 30 minutes

About GoGrid’s SLA

When we launched our Public Cloud service, we wanted our customers to be assured that they would have the most robust SLA in the cloud computing industry, not just limited to hosting. We stand by our SLA and work with our customers closely to ensure that they both understand it and can utilize it as appropriate.

We are proud that an independent and trusted benchmarking firm also recognizes not only the importance of having a vendor with a solid SLA but also a provider with “one of the most reliable IaaS services we currently monitor (100% US Web and 99.999% US East [uptime])”.

Do SLAs matter? We believe that they do! When you look to choose a cloud provider, be sure that their SLA and Uptime reflect what your business and your customers demand and don’t settle for anything less!